Digital cameras are great for instant note taking. You can take pictures of book pages, engineering drawings, a whiteboard or any object. Unfortunately, photographing book pages often produces a distorted image, hard to read. We’ve just tried out a program called “Cam to Scan” to correct the distortion; it’s from camtoscan.de.

Cam to Scan did a pretty good job on some of our test documents, especially small books, though it had some trouble with large books. Using the camera’s flash sometimes makes the problem worse, so we nearly always disable that. In fact, flash is rarely useful. The program costs $40, but fortunately you can try it for free. If you use it long enough, the free version will eventually place a watermark on your image, pushing you to pay up.